04 Jun How To Use Social Media Marketing & Get Your Strategy Right

Social Media Marketing can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to your site, building brand awareness and long term customer relationships, but failure to properly identify the characteristics of your market and develop a plan to engage with users will only lead to wasted time and money. This post shows you how social media fits into your overall marketing strategy, which platforms you should be using and tips for engaging with your followers.

Before You Start Getting Social

Before you get started with social media it’s important to understand how it fits into the inbound marketing cycle. The image below shows a condensed version of SEOmoz’s SEO Pyramid.

You need to have the base of the pyramid before you can start working with the top of the pyramid. Social media is what you do when you have something great to share already. If your content is weak, the greatest social media strategy in the world is likely to fail. Imagine a user visits your website, dislikes it and leaves. They may never visit again. So whilst Social Media is a fantastic tool, it is not a replacement for existing SEO best practice.

Which Social Media Platform

Picking a platform is all about understanding your audience, the industry in which you operate and the type of message you will be sending. The following is a very basic guide to the top social media platforms and types of message they are most effective for:

Facebook: Well suited to less formal communications. Interesting facts and images which are easily digested by users. Facebook is primarily used by people in the casual, social and consumer context. Think at home, on the sofa, watching TV. In depth information is generally going to be less effective as people are unlikely to spend time time looking at it. Facebook also creates a community around your business, so be prepared for your customers to talk to each other and understand that you might not always like what they have to say.

Twitter: Good for both business and consumer communication. Twitter allows an exceptional freedom of communication between people and can be useful for more direct interactions and engagement with customers. Well suited to interesting nuggets of information and sharing. Great for updating your users with new content and product information. Seek to have a two way dialogue rather than simply posting information. Building engagement will be beneficial from both a feedback and promotional viewpoint.

Google Plus: The one you probably don’t see the point in using. Google plus has a large number of users but much lower levels of engagement. The image below shows a quick break down of it’s users top occupations and the top 10 companies listed as employers. As you can see it’s predominantly made up of people in the tech industries.

So if your in the tech industry G plus is going to be a great way of engaging with users.

The more important thing to consider with G+ is the impact it may have on results in the future. Google has publicly stated that social signals will play an important role in ranking factors in the coming years and G+ and, being the Google platform, is going to be a significant influencer in this area. For those who are early adopters of Google social platform their will be big benefits, such as the authorship markup, which is only available to those with a G+ profile.

LinkedIn: Obviously highly targeted at users operating in a professional capacity, LinkedIn is the place to post industry specific, technical information. Information posted here can be much more in depth than on other social platforms.

Pinterest: Whilst still in its infancy, Pinterest has been a fantastic driver of traffic for many businesses. If you have interesting and attractive images on your site you should be looking to capitalize on them right now.

Planning Your Social Activities

Once you know who you’re communicating with and which platform will be most effective, you need to have a plan for releasing content and engaging with users. Whilst it will vary with each platform, an outline could go as follows:

Friday: Video Post, Respond To Some Issues Over The Week, Add Short Entertainment Content

This gives you a general impression of the types of engagement activities that can take place over the course of a week. You might also like to include Google Hangouts if you are on G+.

There are a few key tips to encouraging engagement with your content once you start posting:

End posts with a question and leave the conversation open. If you post a response to a comment by someone on your own content, ensure you are friendly, open and conversational, leaving room for the next person to answer.

Tag People where appropriate, but don’t get spammy. Tagging people in a post is a powerful tool, but use it all the time an people will ignore you

Be personal. Engaging on social isn’t like writing an email. You are having a conversation. Remember the saying: Write like you are talking to your best friend in front of your mother.

When posting a link or an image, say something about it. The more you say, the more people feel they are able to respond.

Set Goals

You wouldn’t set out on any marketing activity without having some firm goals in place. Social media is no different. Goals you might use for social media could include:

Using Google Analytics and establishing measures for conversions can help you monitor the success of your campaigns and help you make adjustments if it isn’t working.

Social Share Buttons

So you’ve got your social accounts up and running. It’s good idea to add some social buttons to your site. Just remember to add the right ones. This example below was seen on a hotel website recently. MySpace is fine if you are in a band or the music industry, but less useful for travel these days. Times change and your social buttons should too.